Lawyer in Trump Jnr furore takes on Ikea
THE Russian lawyer at the centre of a political storm this summer over a meeting with US President Donald Trump’s son is battling Ikea in a legal case that could see its Moscow head office bulldozed.
The case follows a raid of the furniture giant’s offices by Russian authorities last year.
Their probe concluded there had been ‘a serious fraud’ and ‘criminal intent’ relating to land ownership documents. That included fake local government papers, supposedly from 1993 but said to have been produced years later.
Natalia Veselnitskaya from Kamerton Consulting is representing the interests of a local collective farm, set up following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. She said the forged documents mean Ikea’s office was built on ‘stolen’
land belonging to her client. She previously found herself in the spotlight after it emerged she met Donald Trump Jr last year. She said suggestions she was acting as a conduit for information between the Trump camp and the Kremlin were ‘bulls***’.
She said of Ikea: ‘My client says it never waived the rights to the land and it was stolen so should be returned.’ She said even if Ikea was not responsible for forging the documents or aware of the crime, it has been profiting from the land. The Swedish furniture giant opened its first Russian store in 2000.
Ikea has argued that the deadline for the collective to stake a claim to the land has lapsed and so it has no case to answer. Veselnitskaya said her client raised the issue as soon as it became aware of it.
Ikea is trying to have the case quashed, but if this fails it will be heard in court on October 18. If it loses, it could be forced to demolish its offices and return the land; hand it back with the buildings intact; or pay the farm a large sum to keep the land.
Veselnitskaya told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There are similar cases dating back to the 1990s where parties were found forging documents to obtain property. Immediately after the USSR collapsed it was a complete mess: there was no transparency in property transactions and most of it was uncontrolled. It would be impossible to do that today.’
Ikea did not respond to repeated requests for comment in time for publication.